“'The guy, I’m telling him like, "Please step off the school grounds," and this dude comes up and bumps into me and then tells me that I pushed him, and he knocked me down,' an official at Roosevelt High School said. 'They don’t care. They’re just animals. I’ve never seen people behave like this.'"

This has become a key part of my classes that include WW2. The Nazis were almost entirely dweebs and losers who were disliked and uncompetitive, unleashing resentment at people who were smarter and more charismatic than they were. The “evil super genius” shtick is all a fiction.

Gavin Newsom is an incompetent transphobic centrist who is unfit for elected office. His repeated failures to protect the basic human rights of his own constituents is clear misconduct in office. He should be impeached immediately.

“Trad cath” is, weirdly, code for “unfamiliar with Catholicism”

Just pondering AI-usage/Ozempic/gym-obsession as part of a grand unified psy-op to encourage alienation from self and others, and as a backdoor to introducing far-right self-image to otherwise non-inclined people. Interacting with this stuff feels increasingly out of joint, and that seems telling.

If a government tells you that you can’t call it authoritarian, it’s authoritarian.

This is happening Thursday!!! I would love to see folks come out to this

Twin Cities! Two FREE abolition related events happening next week/weekend! On Thursday, September 11 at 6pm, the Committee to Free the Mississippi Five is showing Calls from Home, and a panel after w/ Garrett Felber and our incarcerated comrade Loretta Pierre. www.eventbrite.com/e/calls-from...

Wow it’s Fresno and Saint Paul working together

When we were all supposed to support the Ivies as bulwarks of academic freedom despite their elitist disdain for everyone else and then they go full Quisling anyway…almost makes u think that they didn’t care about academic freedom or the purity of knowledge in the first place…

I think about this quite a lot insofar as it gives the lie to two writing extremes: academia on the one hand and social media on the other. Both, interestingly, are supposedly about writing-as-thought, in a mediated way on the one hand and an immediate way on the other.

Important to note that this is true at public universities as well. I haven’t met a single non-affiliated Minnesotan who knew how UMN was run, anything about the insanely conservative slant of the Board, or that it had all purposely been constructed to prevent any kind of democratic oversight.

You love to see elite (and elitist) institutions demand support from the larger academic community they actively disdain and disparage and then turn around and flush it all down the toilet in order to preserve a cozy relationship with the ruling power. Almost like it’s not actually about knowledge…

everyone who said we shouldn't abolish ICE should spend some time thinking about the mistaken ideas that led them to that incorrect take

Thinking about how Ho Chi Minh knew how to make Parker house rolls and Boston cream pie.

The logistics that ICE will be asked to handle here are nightmarish, and they are already finding difficulties in multiple locations with their current budget. ICE is deeply unpopular, and they can very quickly become the most loathed group in the US, with people getting bolder in resisting them

University gen AI training is presented as addressing a deficit in us. Staff and students need to be taught how to use it ethically and responsibly. But the problem is with the technology itself. It’s inherently unethical and irresponsible: extractive, imperialistic, delusional, and unsustainable.

This is continued journalistic malpractice from the @startribune.com normalizing a violent white male suspect. He owned a private security company called Praetorian Guard, traveled overseas to preach against abortion and LGBTQ+ people, and attended a bible college that preaches "violent prayer."

Spoken like a true Midwestern sports fan.

since i'm apparently already feeling angry and vindictive today it feels like a good time to ask where the "don't call Trump fascist" debate has landed, you know, post-secret police

Hey Twin Cities folks! A coalition of library workers is rallying to push for a budget increase for Minitex, the state-wide resource-sharing org that saves school, public, and academic libraries hundreds of dollars a year, and which is in danger from IMLS cuts.

When are Kyra Sedgwick and Meg Ryan making a late middle aged lesbian Western together

Pope Francis staying alive long enough to insult JD Vance is an amazing exercise in will. May his memory be a blessing.

There's scholars of fascism making a big show of moving to Canada so that they don't "get out too late", and there's scholars who are publicly defending the students actually threatened by both the Trump and University administrations. Sharp divide between theory and praxis in resisting fascism here

The Signal fiasco is obscuring an essential question: Why is the US bombing Yemen? — my latest for @theguardian.com | www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

In so far as it's a sign, it's a sign that elite academics enjoy mobility that 99% of their colleagues do not, given the absurdities of the academic labor market. If you wanted the "direst sign of bad things to come," that was probably when Mahmoud Khalil got detained.

Individual teachers cannot be expected to solve this problem, and the challenge requires us to get to roots of a system that students see as purely transactional (for good reason) and for which AI can fulfill the transaction. Putting this on individual teachers is simply unfair.

Karl Marx died on this day in 1883. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."

When the University of Minnesota is working to pass a policy making it basically not allowed to speak publicly about “current events” without the prior approval of the president’s office. That’s the kind of courage you love to see from universities in blue states

I hate the framing “this deportation puts Jews at risk.” It is wrong to deport a permanent resident for their constitutionally protected speech. Mahmoud Khalil is *immediately* the victim of terrifying state repression.

Why Fresno County could hurt more from Medicaid cuts than most of the country fresnoland.org/2025/03/11/m...

The elitism and eugenics rhetoric being thrown around in regards to TX and the measles outbreak is troubling and dehumanizing. “We in the south are a multicultural populace held hostage by voter suppression, gerrymandering to high hell, and the failures of legacy media establishment…” -Dr. Seema

I get that people are freaked out, and rightly so, about the attack on academic freedom and universities more broadly, and also, it absolutely matters that we drop the pretense that’s been at the heart of “higher ed” in this country for at least 50 years. When the fashies talk about shutting down

Not really sure how this follows since private institutions with endowments in the billions will weather the storm far better than already-defunded public colleges that serve more than a tiny elite. I’d argue it’s more consistent to support public science and oppose higher ed elitism.

Every “elite” educational institution needs to be shut down.

This is the irony of teaching this as a historian. Where normally the refrain is “it’s complicated,” here it’s “actually this isn’t as complicated as people claim.” No thousands of years of history. No crazy ancient religious blood feud. Just standard colonialism and ethno-nationalism.

This is 100% on the mark, worth reading. Silicon Valley isn't in the tech business. Few people get rich by creating truly innovative new tech. LOTS of people have gotten rich by creating something of minor significance and then running pump-and-dump schemes premised on innovations that aren't there.

"When you ride TESLA, you ride with Hitler. Join Public Transportation Today!" Reworked WW2 poster spotted in Oakland

I think it’s important to understand that they aren’t going to crater the economy as part of some 11-dimensional chess move. They are going to crater the economy because they are very, very stupid, and cannot handle being told “no.”

remember, the blitzkrieg is intended to make you feel like there is nothing you can do about it; that’s the only reason to go forward in this haphazard and sloppy manner all in the first week and the choice of that strategy tells you they are afraid you *will* do something about it

There’s real shit and real tragedies going on which I acknowledge and also the fact that The Brutalist was able to get made and distributed and reviewed in the form that it is should make everyone incandescently angry.

Nothing like anything the AHA does making you again reflect on how fatally morally compromised the academic establishment is.

I spent most of my adult life watching schools say they can't expel professors for sexually assaulting and harassing students and colleagues only to see how quickly they react over social media posts against genocide

This is actually an incredible case of saying the quiet part out loud on behalf of so many academics over the last fifteen months: they simply care more about their jobs than genocide.

I talked with my friends @prisonculture.bsky.social, @deanspade.bsky.social, @emanabdelhadi.bsky.social, and @shaneburley.bsky.social about activism and organizing in 2025 and how we should move into the next phase of struggle.

My endless complaint about progressive Minnesotans crowing about how much this is a “sanctuary.” It’s not a sanctuary if people can’t afford to live here. It’s not a sanctuary if it’s racially segregated. It’s not a sanctuary if you expect people to act just like you or leave.

Sure would be great if vital Left voices didn’t start fucking up before we’ve even started by succumbing to bullshit conspiracy theories.